When I interviewed sound artist Tim Hecker recently, I asked about his live show. It’s something I don’t normally do, because YouTube can usually answer such queries for me. But because he's an artist who doesn’t perform that often and who straddles the line between the avant-garde and “conventional” pop...
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Swans are the Game of Thrones of bands: epic in scale, tonally intense, and if you told me any of the members had once crushed a man's skull with their bare hands, I wouldn't question it. At the Roseland Theater on Sept. 6, each song unfurled with a season's worth of stomach-knotting dread, and most at about half the length of a typical GoT episode. (And even better: no s...
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Tim Hecker isn’t a tortured soul. He just plays one on record.

Music Stories
Sound artist Tim Hecker spends a lot of interviews correcting misconceptions about himself, chief among them that he is not
a 19th-century European vampire. It’s an understandable mistake,
rea
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Pop’s ruling California Girl is coming to extend Portland’s summer. To know her means to know her hometown.

Headout
Summer isn’t over until Katy Perry gets
off tour. A native of Santa Barbara, the pop megastar is a human solar
panel, powering her rainbow-colored aural gumdrops with all the sunlight
and ta
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Music Stories
[TORTURE PORN FOR THE SOUL] Rumor has it that, back in its No Wave heyday, Swans
would play so loud it’d cause audiences to vomit. That’s probably an
urban myth, but it might as well be true
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On the road again.

Movie Reviews & Stories
The phrase “it is what it is” is a plague on the English language. But in the case of The Trip to Italy, a sequel to 2010’s The Trip,
the intrinsic nature of the film—established by its pr
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The story of Portland’s original all-ages gay nightclub.

Music Stories
The first time Daniel Schaefer went to the City
Nightclub—the only all-ages gay dance club in Portland and, at the time,
the country—he and his friends spent half an hour dawdling out front,
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The most reviled band of the ’70s is coming to the Moda Center. Here are the worst things ever said about them.

Headout
Everyone hates the Eagles. Not literally everyone, of
course. A band doesn’t sell 40 million copies of a greatest-hits record
without having a few fans. But you know you’re despised when the
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The band's weekend shows at Oregon Zoo will continue as scheduled.

Derek Rieth, for two decades a percussionist in Portland pop orchestra Pink Martini, has died, the band announced via its Facebook page this afternoon. Rieth, born in 1971, played several instruments for the band, including drums, bongos and finger cymbals. No cause of ...
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Music Stories
[AMPS OF DESTRUCTION] Four years ago, Nial McGaughey (pictured) sat down
on his couch and, for no particular reason, decided to build an
amplifier. It wasn’t a totally left-field decision: He we
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